Article

New Guinea

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

New Guinea

New Guinea, the large island north of Australia divided between the Dutch (later Indonesian) and British (later Australian) empires, appears in the Society’s literature as a site of both ethnographic observation and geopolitical contestation. The island’s significance to the Malay world was twofold: as a source of indigenous cultural practices that invited cross-cultural comparison with the peoples of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, and as a flashpoint in the Cold War that directly shaped the security calculations and constitutional evolution of Malaya in the early 1960s. The Society’s records span these two registers, from a brief ethnographic note published in 1918 to a substantial diplomatic history published in 2010, reflecting the shifting priorities of scholarship and the changing political salience of the island over nearly a century.

Ethnographic Observations and Cross-Cultural Parallels

The earliest documented engagement with New Guinea in the Society’s literature is a short note by Miss L. S. Gibbs, published in 1918, which records three ethnographic observations made during phytogeographical fieldwork in the Arfak Mountains of Dutch New Guinea in 1913 [1]. Gibbs’s observations were made among her Wariap and Stari carriers on the south-west coast of Geelvink Bay, and they concern bodily practices that she presented as candidates for cross-cultural comparison.

The first practice documented was the habitual rubbing of Laportea or Fleurya leaves on the forearms and legs during mountain climbs, a form of deliberate urtication that Gibbs recorded without extensive commentary [1, p. 15]. The second was the ritual spiral-slicing of a young man’s calves by a Timorese sergeant, an act that Gibbs noted as a distinct cultural practice rather than a medical procedure [1, p. 15]. The third concerned the application of faeces to the limbs of a woman who had been treated with Glauber’s Salts, apparently as a post-recovery rite [1, p. 15]. Gibbs explicitly invited readers to supply parallels from other primitive peoples, framing the note as a stimulus for comparative ethnography rather than a definitive account.

Two appendices responded to this invitation. W. R. Humphreys drew a parallel from the Arawaks and Macusi of British Guiana, who rubbed themselves with a nettle (identified tentatively as Kamari?) to stimulate circulation during long journeys and to relieve back-ache [1, pp. 15–16]. H. N. Ridley cited Giraldus Cambrensis on the Roman practice of using Urtica pilulifera to relieve cold-induced stiffness in Britain, suggesting a common functional logic of urtication across cultures separated by vast distances [1, p. 16]. The note thus established a pattern of using New Guinea as a point of departure for broader comparative arguments about the universality of certain bodily practices, a methodological approach characteristic of early twentieth-century ethnography.

The West New Guinea Dispute and Malayan Security

The second major body of documentation concerns the West New Guinea dispute between the Netherlands and Indonesia, which Nicholas Tarling examined in a 2010 article that reconstructed the British and Malayan dimensions of the crisis between 1957 and 1963 [2]. Tarling’s central argument was that the dispute was a decisive but underappreciated catalyst for Tunku Abdul Rahman’s proposal to create Greater Malaysia, and that the Tunku’s motivation was driven significantly by anxiety over Indonesia’s growing military power and its potential designs on the Borneo territories, not merely by demographic or economic considerations [2, p. 77].

The dispute arose from Indonesia’s claim to the Dutch-administered territory of West New Guinea, which the Netherlands sought to retain or transfer under conditions acceptable to Jakarta. The Tunku, as a newly independent leader, attempted to mediate between the two parties through a UN trusteeship formula that would ultimately transfer West New Guinea to Indonesia [2, pp. 82–83]. Prime Minister Djuanda accepted this formula only on the condition that the trust period not exceed one year, and that Indonesia’s concurrence was limited to the peace-and-security provisions of Article 76 of the UN Charter [2, pp. 82–83]. British officials, particularly Fred Warner at the Foreign Office, opposed the scheme on the grounds that it denied the Papuans a voice, was legally inconsistent with Article 76 of the UN Charter, and would set a dangerous precedent for British dependencies [2, p. 83]. Warner warned that “the next stage would almost certainly be Indonesian agitation for Australian New Guinea and the British Borneo territories” [2, p. 83].

The mediation ultimately failed when Indonesian Foreign Minister Subandrio publicly rejected any settlement short of direct transfer, and the crisis culminated in the New York Agreement of August 1962, brokered by the United States through Ellsworth Bunker, which transferred West New Guinea to UN administration and thence to Indonesia [2, p. 88]. The British embassy in Jakarta speculated that the settlement would be “too much of an anticlimax” for Sukarno, who would be left with “the tiresome and unromantic problem of setting up a civil administration in Hollandia” [2, p. 88].

Strategic Implications for Malaya and the Creation of Malaysia

The security implications of the dispute for Malaya were profound and operated through several channels. The British High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, Geofroy Tory, assessed in December 1958 that the “ultimate Indonesian aim” was to absorb Malaya, and that if the government failed to create a Malay consciousness, Malay leaders might look to Indonesia as a way of preserving Malay dominance [2, p. 79]. This assessment reflected a broader British concern that Indonesian militarisation, facilitated by Soviet arms supplies, transformed the security calculus for both London and Kuala Lumpur [2, p. 77].

The Tunku first raised the idea of enlarging the Federation to include Singapore, North Borneo, Sarawak, and Brunei on 10 June 1960, in a conversation with Lord Perth at the Colonial Office, prompted by the dispatch of the Dutch aircraft carrier Karel Doorman to New Guinea waters in May 1960 [2, p. 80]. The timing was significant: the carrier’s deployment signalled Dutch determination to defend its claim, which in turn reinforced Indonesian resolve and heightened Malayan anxiety about the broader regional balance of power. The Tunku’s proposal was thus a structural response to a security threat that domestic politics made difficult to address directly: UMNO’s pro-Indonesian sympathies made it impossible for the Tunku to take an openly anti-Indonesia stance, yet the security implications of Indonesian militarisation demanded action [2, p. 77].

When hostilities appeared imminent, the Tunku declared in the Malayan parliament that Malaya would be neutral, and when Acting UN Secretary-General Thant asked him to influence Indonesia against aggression, he replied that he was “not prepared to stick his neck out a second time” [2, p. 88]. This response encapsulated the limits of Malayan agency in a dispute that was ultimately resolved by great-power diplomacy rather than regional initiative.

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on New Guinea reflects two distinct phases of engagement separated by nearly a century. The 1918 note by Gibbs represents an earlier mode of scholarship in which New Guinea served as a source of ethnographic data for comparative analysis, with the island’s peoples positioned as participants in a global pattern of bodily practices. The methodological framework was explicitly comparative and sought to establish functional equivalences across widely separated cultures, a approach that has since been superseded by more context-sensitive ethnographic methods.

The 2010 article by Tarling represents a fundamentally different engagement, in which New Guinea is not a subject of cultural study but a geopolitical actor whose contested sovereignty shaped the constitutional and security decisions of a neighbouring state. Tarling’s work addresses a gap in two intersecting historiographies: the history of the West New Guinea dispute, which had been told predominantly from Dutch, Australian, and American perspectives, and the history of Malaysia’s creation, which had not adequately accounted for the Indonesian threat as a motivating factor [2, p. 89]. The study draws primarily on National Archives, Kew records from the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, and Colonial Office, with no equivalent Malayan archival material available; Tarling acknowledges this asymmetry and its implications for understanding the centre of Malayan decision-making [2, p. 89].

The contrast between these two records illustrates how the significance of New Guinea to the Malay world shifted from a matter of cultural curiosity to one of existential strategic concern, and how the Society’s documentation evolved accordingly from brief observational notes to sustained diplomatic history.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. L.S. Gibbs (1918). Some peculiar Papuan customs JSBRAS 79: 15–16.
  2. N. Tarling (2010). Britain, the Tunku and West New Guinea 1957–1963 JMBRAS 83(1): 77–90. Read on JSTOR